Independent advice on operational systems and maintenance tasks

Having been involved in every aspect of the building and running of a light rail system, the BGR principals are aware of all of the inter related systems giving maintenance and operations good key performance indicators for the operation of a high performing light rail system.

In the maintenance area, it runs from the driver’s pre-service inspection, to the maintainers servicing of the tram with water and sand, plus cleaning after service.

Most trams these days consist of similar types of systems that need maintenance and inspection at usual intervals of thousands of KM, the big inspections at 150k, 300k are also very important and should not be missed or delayed.

Wheels and wheel maintenance, including design and selection and location of a wheel lathe are also vital Rolling stock items to be considered.

Track and infrastructure are equally important in the total rail systems space, failure to maintain the track effectively can lead to all sorts of difficult issues such as stray current, sand build up, premature wear, and derailments over broken or improperly set points and switches,

BGR Principals have designed and built programmes for light rail track maintenance and civil structures maintenance and operated rolling stock programmes over a number of years.

Whether the operators maintain the system themselves or it is done by others, its vital to understand what must be done and when to do it. This should be reflected in the contracts with the maintainer and reported in accurate and relevant KPI.

A number of interconnected systems are required by the operator to properly record all of the key performance parameters. These again have either been built by the BGR principals or operated as supplied. The system effectively needs to be built from the ground up in each case, understanding what need to be reported and ensuring that a system exists to collect that data. Frequently, the designers create a system that works but forget or don’t understand to install systems to gather the maintenance or key performance data. Very often, the builders of systems don’t appreciate the use of the system they install and either select an inappropriate one or one that is missing some key information.

We would see as essential, performance data such as availability, and reliability plus a pareto of defects as basic performance data across all assets

Advice on bid costing

Not including systems and processes necessary for the effective running of a light rail can be counterproductive in the long run. Designing a system that has all of the features required to run it well, means a bid for a consortium that will know what its talking about and can reliably run it for many years without deductions for poor operational performance.

Understanding what that bid should contain is a key requirement to getting the bid right and allow proper running.

Not maintaining it can be also counterproductive, poor practice will lead to a decrease in performance and a loss of asset condition at end of contract. Thus. It’s essential to know and understand why proposed maintenance programmes will be effective or not.

Prospective contracts between the parties should have reference to who is responsible for what duties and activities around the operation and maintenance.

Understanding the workability

Knowing that maintenance must be done but not allowing time for it to happen, is a critical but common mistake. Planning to maintain the track, but only during the daytime is wasteful of system shutdowns and staff. Modern European light rails rarely shut down, and instead, do repairs and maintenance at night during engineering hours. Having insufficient vehicles is also an error as they need to be out on track during the day and maintained at night or have enough that you can heavily maintain at least one during the day.

All rail vehicles will have a level of failure that most designers don’t properly consider in the allocation of vehicle numbers, understanding the types of failure and their impact to service is a critical consideration.

Journey time and the effects of both traffic and installation of priority at junctions is also often left to the ideal situation rather than reality. Having Priority should be a critical consideration in the planning of a system, as it significantly increases the average speed of the vehicles and reduces the demand for vehicles on the track.

EMC design monitoring and maintenance of systems

Light rail systems by their very nature can be electrically noisy and potentially quite corrosive in their usually brown fields environment. This is because, in order to be as safe as possible in the built environment, they are Direct Current systems that return current to the substations via the rails.

This causes two effects in the environment, one is the emission of emf from the current carrying overhead wire and systems running off it, and the second is potential loss of current into the ground from the rails.

Knowing where these effects are critical such as around hospitals, universities and knowing what to monitor in order to minimize the effects on the potentially affected parties is critical in specifying a design.

Both of these effects can be mitigated by use of different technology in the brownfields area. On board systems such as batteries or super capacitors are now able to sustain tram loads for significant distances in the order of a couple of kilometers in between charges. Given the significant cost reduction on the catenary free areas and not having to move utilities, and the reduction in EMF and stray current, much greater consideration needs to be given to this technology in the present design and construction of light rail.

Platforms, flooding and other civil structures

Platforms, bridges, viaducts, depots, drainage, flood plains, are just some of the structures and conditions that need to be carefully considered in the railway environment. Failing to understand any of the parameters in terms of how often a flood occurs or to what extent, can lead to a failure to operate or a loss of assets.

In platform, bridge or viaduct construction, understanding that the calculations are correct and that it has been competently “proof engineered” will save significant cost, loss of reputation and potential accident.

BGR principals have been involved in assessment of flood plains, calculation of runoff /rainfall events, water attenuation, bridge strengthening, bridge construction and proof engineering activities for many years and can advise on the likely scenarios and the best courses of action.

Understanding BCA and DDA compliance

It’s usually taken for granted that infrastructure built will be BCA and DDA compliant. This however is not always the case. It’s very expensive to go back and fix things that are not compliant in the design. These can include stairs and lifts, circulation distances, platforms, tactile arrangements, handrails, boarding distances and so on.

Some items cannot be compliant and an exception needs to be sought where it’s not possible, an example being the tracks in the roadway at pedestrian crossings.

Experienced BGR consultants can review designs and advise on all of this activity and specification.

Safety case construction and risk register management

Unfortunately, these two things often happen after the design rather than in tandem with or before. Construction of a safety case really means that you have thought about all the risks in a project and designed them out or captured them in a risk register and are going to give them to somebody to manage during the course of running the railway. The operational plan falling out of the risk register should ensure that all these risks are accounted for, in how the network is intended to be run. So, a really key document to understanding how a proposed network ought to run, and what its safety record is likely to be.

Handling this basic concept at the start and not leaving things open or unspecified could avoid unresolvable problems and cost over runs. A good example being the fitting of ATP or ETACS in an area that we know has steep downgrades and a sharp corner, or not ensuring that vehicles are interoperable on another network it shares or may join at some point.

BGR principals have participated in this process for both the IWE and the CSELR and constructed safety cases and provided evidence that the mitigations are in place for regulators. We have also met frequently with the regulators and understand both their process and their objectives for allowing activities to happen.

Depot design and operational control systems

The depot is a very critical hub of operation for a light rail system. It can be very difficult to get the design right at the start, and having built and advised on the design or construction of five different light rail depots to date, the BGR principals are very well versed.

Size and location of Depots are interlinked and very critical. Invariably, depots get expanded as the network becomes popular and sufficient space needs to be left for that.

Getting the right equipment in, and putting it somewhere that it can be used is also a critical consideration. Thinking that you can operate a light rail depot without a wheel lathe is a poor mistake to make, yet it has been done, along with layout of the facilities. Significant mistakes have been made in the past with cooling of tech rooms, placement of battery charging rooms, and division of engineering spaces, and provision of sufficient safe parking for drivers and engineering staff.

The systems that should be installed in the depot also need careful consideration for optimum operations. Ideally, the depot should have more than one track out, a dedicated route setting system, sanding and washing to incoming trams, a dedicated lane for trams compromised in service, somewhere flat and easily made safe, to conduct the now obligatory tram wrapping activity.

The control room layout and systems installed are crucial to running the tramway effectively. Ideally, the system should run itself with only input required when something goes wrong. This invariable does, with collisions, tripping passengers, antisocial activity, lost and separated children, lost property, disability assistances, passengers holding doors, TVM issues etc.

Reporting of the system performance should be automatic as should be the recording of electrical data, such as stray current and electrical consumption.

This functionality is enabled by fitting Automatic vehicle locating system to the network specifying what parameters it reports and what reporting function is enabled.

The power SCADA system should also report on, or provide data automatically for power consumption and stray current monitoring.

Building management systems should also be employed as the depot will be in use 24/7 and

heating /cooling and lighting need to be monitored and controlled effectively.

BGR principals have considerable experience managing these issues first hand, and can have considerable input in setting out design.

Integration studies and usability

Isambard Brunel once said, that, “the Rail and the railcar cannot be considered separately, they must be considered as part of the same machine”

Therein is the essence of integration and the understanding that all parts of the system need to work together and not conflict. Due to the way we do business today, this is one of the hardest things to achieve in a modern railway. The track cannot be built without due consideration of the vehicle to be placed upon it, and likewise the vehicle cannot be built without due consideration of the track that it will run on. Letting contracts separately is fine, provided that the railway proposers have considered all of the elements within the network and specified the critical parameters. An integration study should be a key tool used to figure out will it work together and a key part of the requirements matrix specifying what should work together. The type of build package can have a significant influence on how integration is achieved.

BGR have seen many integration issues over the years and they are usually the result of failing to specify exactly what the vehicle can do or how the infrastructure should work.

An integration study should look at each element with every other to ensure that they work together.

Effective reporting for efficient tram running

Running a tram system effectively and at its most efficient, requires lots of streams of information to identify precursors to delay conditions and careful management of the factors that we can control. Knowing which streams to capture and report on, is key information for an operator or PTA. A tram system makes lots of different movements a day, most of which are directly controlled by a tram driver. Many different human factors come into play when you’re dealing with people both driving and travelling. These should be considered and listed as risks to manage.

Usually the best way to analyze lots of different events is to have a primary event recording system that everything is recorded into. This can then be searched for tram faults, safety incidents, driver issues and so on. The operational running data from the AVLS system can then be compared with the manual data and the relevant relief events identified.

This process of recording, sorting and analyzing data is vital to producing an efficient tramway that identifies issues early and has a systematic way to resolve them.

Having a suitable AVLS system to collect and record that primary data is paramount to the PTA getting accurate information in reports.

Noise and vibration control

In the space of noise with rail, it’s better not to make it in the first place. It’s definitely a problem that’s very difficult to deal with by both the operator and the PTA, once noise is being made. Invariably complaints wind up in the minister’s office rather than straight into the operator. Even when noise is within specified defined limits, the complaints still keep coming into the minister’s office. Clearly, the objective should be to make as little noise as possible from the start.

In BGR’s experience, silence can be achieved by careful integrated system design, attention to the wheel rail interface, accurate and on time wheel re profiling and ensuring that the rail vehicles are fitted with the correct types of greasers.

All rail vehicles are equipped with flange lube kits but the positive difference is often the complexity of the programming and delivery system and the ability to dispense top of rail product in difficult areas.

In some very challenging environments, we can also think outside the box and spray water on the rail or utilize grass track to reduce noise.

Use of traceability matrix

How do we know that a proposed tramway meets all the requirements of a specification? Usually a requirements and traceability matrix is used (RATM) this can be as simple as an excel spreadsheet or could be a software tool such as Doors or other such commercially available product.

Using this kind of tool greatly simplifies the work of the PTA as the can quickly identify and assess whether a design or proposal meets all the requirements set out by the PTA.

The same tool used by the D&C client, establishes whether changing one design feature affects any others or significantly affects the requirements.

The view of things to come, technology and its rate of change

Tramways have been around for a very long time and a new one now can look the same as one that’s some 100 years old! This is predominantly because infrastructure tends to last longer than vehicles and the replaced vehicles will have to run on the old network. When building an unconnected network from new, some of those considerations do not have to be considered.

The use of Overhead Catenary systems is one such issue. They were invented to conduct electrical power to a moving vehicle when clearly it could not carry it aboard itself. Their use brought many problems in DC railway. These were, stray current and corrosion, EMR emissions, poor electrical motor performance, danger to public from their proximity, distance of dc transmission etc. Modern trams can now travel significant distances catenary free, utilizing on board electrical energy storage.

This technology improvement and change will alter the way particularly Light rail will look in the future. Gone will be the necessity to move deep utilities, gone the necessity to dig deep catenary pole foundations and all the problems associated with Overhead lines, DC substations, electrical transmission and so on.

BGR can advise on which modern wire free technology to choose, or create a matrix showing the relative advantage of one over the other.